Utica bringing back Pothole Killer’

Sunday

Feb 27, 2011 at 12:01 AMFeb 27, 2011 at 11:26 PM

Beneath the city’s snow-battered roads are an excess of potholes, opened after a few days of spring-like weather in mid-February. Even though the Public Works Department cannot fix the streets until the weather breaks, the city is forming a plan of attack.

After two seasons of blasting, patching and paving, the city is again bringing back a machine Mayor David Roefaro’s administration has aptly named “The Pothole Killer.”

The contraption, a truck that uses a spray-injection patching system, has been rented by the city each summer since 2009 to repair cracks, dips and general degradation of the city’s streets.

The city does not, however, have money budgeted to completely rebuild the base of any streets – except for the proposed Oneida Square roundabout — beyond milling existing asphalt and replacing it with new material.

City Public Relations Director Angelo Roefaro said the mayor’s budget again includes $70,000, enough to rent two pothole killers.

In 2010, the city paid Patch Management Inc., of Fairless Hills, Pa., $70,000 to use two of the machines and materials that come with it. In 2009, the city rented a single machine and spent about $57,000.

The pothole killer blasts water and debris from the hole and uses a mixture of recycled rubber and other materials to fill it, a method expected to last for four to five years, according to the company’s website.

Simply tamping cold asphalt into potholes is considered a cheaper, less-effective alternative to the pothole problem.

Angelo Roefaro has said patches made by that system can come lose and degrade within a few months if the street is heavily traveled.

“(The machine) is more efficient and a lot cheaper than hiring a crew of four people to do the work,” Deputy City Engineer Goran Smiljic said.

A single person can operate the pothole killer.

In the summer of 2009, the city promised it would fill 5,000 potholes by September 2011. Without providing specific statistics, the mayor’s spokesman said goal is within view.

“We’re on target to surpass that number,” Roefaro said.

The city also has $2 million budgeted for mill-and-fill paving projects this year, Smiljic said.

While the price of oil and asphalt will drive how much the city can pave, Smiljic said the city paved 11 miles on portions of 35 streets with the same amount budgeted in 2010.

The state Department of Transportation maintains Route 5S including Oriskany Street in Utica.

“With the freeze and thaw cycle this month, we’re not surprised that potholes might be forming out there,” DOT spokesman Anthony Ilacqua said. “We’ve already been doing some repairs and patching, but right now we’re preparing for more snow that is on the way.”

Ilacqua said the DOT will repair roads as the weather allows but it still is too early in the year to identify specific areas right now.

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